Community Disclosure by People Living With HIV in Rural China

The decision to disclose HIV serostatus is a complex and a challenging task because of potential stigma, blame, and fear associated with HIV infection. Despite continued research on HIV disclosure, literature on HIV disclosure to community is still scarce. The purpose of the study is to describe patterns of HIV status disclosure to community members in a sample of HIV-infected men and women in rural China. This study used the baseline data of a randomized controlled intervention trial for HIV-affected families in China. The data was collected between late 2011 to early 2013. In addition to demographic and HIV-related clinical characteristics, we collected the extent of HIV disclosure to members within the community. We first calculated descriptive statistics and frequencies to describe the demographics of the sample. We then compared the extents of HIV disclosure to different community members. We performed chi-square tests to determine whether the demographic and socioeconomic variables were associated with the extent of HIV disclosure to community. A total of 522 PLH were included in the study. The results show that age and family income are associated with the extent of disclosure of HIV status to members within the community, including neighbor, village leaders, people in the village, and coworkers. More disclosures were found among older age groups. People with less family income tend to disclose more to the community than those with higher family income. There is a need to explore the association of HIV disclosure to the community to help realize the public health and personal implications of disclosure. Our results underscore the potential benefits of age and socioeconomic status-specific interventions in the efforts to dispel barriers to HIV status disclosure to the community.